The first part is a reboot of https://itch.io/t/2059943/how-does-the-popular-filter-for-game-jam-submissions-work which received no answers, to ask how the Popularity filter worked on game jam entries.
Does it take jam entry comments, general page comments and ratings into account?
According to https://itch.io/t/1688766/why-is-this-game-extremely-unpopular-despite-being-played-relatively-much, recent activity matters, and I have seen entries with many comments and good ratings rank well, so I can at least tell one of those two is used.
Second, I found this thread about implementing “Most Karma”: https://itch.io/t/527869/karma-system-for-the-game-jams but I don’t see it anywhere. Is it a setting that the jam host must enable to work? Example on this one: https://itch.io/jam/once-upon-a-time-vn-jam/entries
I’m looking for ways to make sure comments are more distributed across jam entries and avoid the snowball effect of Game is good enough => Many comments and good rating => become Most popular => People who keep default setting will naturally click on first entries at the top of the page => see Game that is good enough => … which produces a few entries with many comments and most of them with almost no comments (making it hard for me to get feedback and improve the game further as well as being motivated to keep working on it, creating the opposite, vicious cycle).
EDIT: I just looked at other jams like Mini Jam where I see all the new options:
including Most Karma, Most Rated and Least Rated! So it must be a jam host options, or do they just appear after all jam entries reach a threshold of N comments total?
Third, about randomness:
One way to encourage spreading comments/ratings is to enforce ratings of random entries for the first N entries to rate, which some jams do - this one has no rating/ranking though so it probably didn’t make sense for host to enable forced randomization.
Is there at least a setting on jam host side to make “randomized” the default sorting, to encourage testing various games?
If those options exist, then the responsibility lies on the jam organizer, and I will talk to them to see if they can set this up for the next jam.